Format/Structure

We will select 5–8 papers for oral presentations. We intend to organise and publish a journal special issue based on the contributions.

Long Abstract

This panel invites contributions that interrogate the temporal tensions, negotiations, and contestations that arise as extractive projects and renewable energy infrastructures encroach on Indigenous and rural lives. Beneath the guise of sustainability, technological, financial, and institutional innovations have accelerated extractive activities and increased the scale of degradation, making previously inaccessible areas viable for exploitation. This acceleration reflects extractive industries’ continual expansion to meet global demands for raw materials—driven by consumerism and commodification of nature, often legitimised by “green” transitions. 

In contrast, slower, cyclical rhythms and temporalities emerge from diverse ways of valuing and relating to nature. These include seasonal practices, intergenerational knowledge, and long-standing temporal relations with nature. Extractivisms and “green” development projects disrupt these rhythms, imposing urgency, bureaucratic deadlines, and fast-paced planning processes that marginalize alternative temporal frameworks. Rather than seeing time as a neutral backdrop for different planning tools, we problematize time as inherently political.

Globally interconnected extractivisms attempt to homogenise these multiple temporalities, but this turmoil can also enable the emergence of diverse and contested futures. We ask: Can time be a site of (in)justice, a medium of repair, a terrain of conflict? What forms of resistance or rupture arise when industrial short-term benefits collide with landscape practices grounded in enduring temporal relations? What clashes arise when different temporalities superpose in extractivist encounters? How are these different temporalities manifested, negotiated, and inscribed in territories? What possibilities emerge out of these temporalities in turmoil? 

We welcome contributions that engage with temporal dimensions of land dispossession and resource governance - from legal processes and environmental assessments to lived experiences and embodied histories. We are also interested in how temporal frictions shape resistance, and what possibilities emerge from contested temporalities. We welcome perspectives from political ecology, critical development studies, human geography, critical heritage studies, legal studies, and beyond. 

This Panel has 2 pending paper proposals.
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